For a long time--I don't know how long really, probably 4 or 5 years at least--along with my various perma-free books, I usually put at least 1 Eric Filler title for free everyday. For October or December I'd usually put Halloween or Christmas titles on sale for free, but the rest of the year was more of a grab bag that depended on what had days available in its 90-day KDP window.
I really can't say how much that impacted real sales, if at all. It didn't usually affect ratings much at all, which I thought was a bummer. But now that people can rate books on Amazon without writing anything at all, I found more often that after I made a book free what I'd get for my generosity was some ass trolling the book with a 1-star to 3-star rating. Some old books like My Wife Changed Me Into a Geek Girl that had 5-star ratings got dragged down to 3 1/2.
Last month I made a new release, Hitchswapper, free for the first time. Up to that point it had like 15 ratings for a 4 star average. I made it free and got trolled with a 1-star rating that dragged it down to 3.5 stars. That pissed me off, so when August 1 came around and I remembered I hadn't set up any free books, I said to myself, well, fuck it. These jerk-offs have taken my generosity for granted just a little too much. So let's not do the extra free books this month and see what happens.
And in the first month...not much difference sales-wise. It didn't completely wipe out my sales or anything. It's pretty much the same as the prior months when I gave away more books. Sales were actually up a little bit over last month.
I think a lot of that is the people who download free books aren't necessarily the type actually reading those books. Most of them are just filling up their Kindle and Cloud with free books they'll probably never read.
As for the trolls who end up giving the book a bad rating, part of that might be what that Amazon Decoded book was saying about giving books away: sometimes you can end up giving the books to people who wouldn't otherwise buy them because they aren't your real audience. So they won't like the book as much. It has often been a problem with people not seeming to understand what the book they downloaded was before they read it.
Obviously though this won't stop people from downloading the books with Kindle Unlimited for "free" and downvoting them. There's really not much I can do about that unless I want to stop putting books on Kindle Unlimited. I'm still not sure about that even though the KU royalty has shrunk from years ago. It used to be about 50% of my revenue but now it's more like 33%. I think that trend started when they switched from the "books borrowed" system to "pages read" system. Someone with a lot of short books like me could benefit more from the former probably more than the latter. But also there are more authors using it and more scammers scamming it.
Sometimes I think about not including a free book link in my newsletter too. Years ago I would just pick something that was free almost at random. But then I had people whine a few times that the book was a Kindle Unlimited promotion so when they finally opened my newsletter, the book was no longer free. Well, TS, I think, but I stopped doing that and used perma-free books instead. But the problem with those is there aren't a lot so I wind up using some over and over. And one time I still had someone whine that the book wasn't free in Canada--like I'm supposed to check the book's link in every single fucking country or something.
Lately I've tried stretching out a little, like I put a link for a gender swap manga instead of a real book. I put a link to another author's newsletter so people could sign up for that and get a free book. And I found another one on Prolific Works. But still it's hard to find stuff that's perma-free so I might decide to just stop doing it and see if I lose most of my newsletter audience or not.
Anyway, it was IWSG day, wasn't it? Was that sufficiently whiny?
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